Today’s off-train excursions on The Ghan are to Marla and Alice Springs. The first stop is a sunrise breakfast at Marla. Up at 5.30 am, the constraints of the single cabin in the dark and with the bed down from the wall become obvious – the only way I can tie my shoelaces is to sit on the bed with the door open to the corridor so that my legs can stick out into the corrido. Getting my camera bag out from under the bed means kneeling on all fours with my backside sticking out into the corridor.
My aspiration of doing some astrophotography is gone when it takes the herd of passengers so long to disembark the train at Marla that the sky has lightened and the stars have disappeared. It is 0.7 degrees Celsius, with an apparent temperature of -4 degrees, but doesn’t feel that cold. The train staff has lit bonfires, which the majority of passengers crowd around. I’ve brought my tripod, and manage to drop my Sony RX10 III whilst walking alongside the train tracks. That’s the sickening sound of a $2k camera hitting the ground. It’s not until I set up on the tripod and look at the LCD screen with the headlamp that I see that the LCD screen has taken the brunt of the fall, and has cracked in the bottom left-hand corner, with a fine crack running diagonally up the screen. Everything still works, including the LCD screen, so it could have been worse. My previous attempt years ago now at dropping a camera involved a Canon 5D DLSR falling off the bonnet of a ute in the Atacama Desert in Chile, destroying all but 1 and a quarter autofocus points. That was a whole other story trying to get that fixed in Santiago. It may be possible to get the LCD screen replaced in Darwin, but I doubt it.
Marla is simply a railway siding in the middle of nowhere, near a farmer’s stockyard. Breakfast is egg and bacon sliders and what I think are vegemite scrolls, all made onboard the train in the galley kitchens.
The Ghan pulls into Alice Springs on time at 1:45 pm. It’s 19 degrees and cooler than expected. I’ve booked a helicopter flight over Mount Gillen and the Larapinta Trail. It seems to involve a lot of waiting around as there are 18 people booked and the helicopter takes 3 passengers at a time. I score the front seat next to the pilot, with a clear footwell looking straight down to the ground. It’s a windy day, and the flight is a little bumpy on the way out to the Larapinta Trail. We fly over Simpson’s Gap, do a neat left-hand turn, and it’s back to the Crowne Plaza Hotel (the marshaling yard for the helicopter flights) in 15 minutes. All up it’s a 2.5-hour wait for a 15-minute flight.
